Bernie's In

@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

We can get silly with this, but think about this, whether someone is a habitual liar or lies occasionally when they need to, both are liars.

Not to mention, I thought you were a republican? I don't know a republican politician who does not have ties to financial institutions or would think it wrong if they did.

I think that most of us really do make a distinction between habitual liars and those who do so only occasionally and under some duress. As for politicians and their relations to their contributors, I believe the dangers are not so much in the business of the contributors as in their behavior, the amount and degree of their contributions and the mutual expectations involved. I would be just as wary of single issue non profits as Labor Unions and financial institutions.

Do you really claim to know what Republican (Or Democrat) politicians think is right or wrong? My experience with folks who are careless with statements about what they "know", often don't know what they are talking about.

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@edgarblythe,

I don't know whether the issue of superdelegates has been raised in this thread (pardon me for not reading 120+ pages of comments), but it's definitely a thorny problem for Bernie:

"By the 1980s, the party elites felt left out of the process, bereft of all influence, and they thought their absence had hurt the party when weaker candidates like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter were nominated. Jim Hunt, Governor of North Carolina, was commissioned to fix the alleged problem, and by 1984 the Superdelegate system was implemented. Democrats thought that by giving more power to party leaders, it would prevent “unelectable” candidates, beloved by the populace, from costing them the general election."

" The Democratic nominee for president is decided based on which candidate wins the most delegates. You will find conflicting information about how many there are in 2016, but according to the AP, the delegate total is 4,763. It takes 2,382 of those to secure the nomination. And of the 4,763, 712 are “Superdelegates”—about 15 percent of the overall total."

"The (712 superdelegates) are not decided by each state’s popular vote, but rather by individuals who are given a vote by the Democratic party. They are free to choose whoever they want at the national convention, regardless of how the vote went in their home state."

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/02/after-sanders-big-win-in-new-hampshire-establishme.html

The article plays down the importance of superdelegates. But if it takes 2,382 delegates to win the nomination, the 712 superdelegates is 30 percent of the number needed to win the nomination.And nearly all of the superdelegates are Democratic Party hacks whose party support in their own political careers depends on doing what the national party bosses tell them to. And the bosses want them to support Hillary Clinton.

If that weren't enough of a hurdle, most Black Democrats are already in the Clinton camp, even if this is largely by force of momentum and many are lukewarm about Hillary. In states like South Carolina where more than 50 percent of registered Democratic voters are Black, that could be a serious problem unless Sanders manages to woo them away. While Sanders appeals strongly to young voters (and presumably by extension to young Black voters), young voters are a minority of Democratic voters in most states.

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@puzzledperson,

That was useful.

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@puzzledperson,

Our democracy is all screwed up!

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@cicerone imposter,

Possibly, but the concern of both parties to have some restraint on the selection of their candidates is real and, in my view, valid. There were many unanticipated side effects resulting from the movement from state conventions with rules governed by state party organizations, to elected delegates in each state. On the face of it this simply adds to the democratic element of the process. However adding 50 individual state campaigns and elections to be gone through initially by the whole field of candidates in each party and at the end just by the finalists increases the total finacial cost of the campaign by an order of magnitude. Where does the money come from? I hear a lot of talk about the growing cost of campaigns and elections but very little addressing this aspect of the problem -- we have ourselves vastly increased the costs of the enterprise. Party organizations, both Democrat and Republican do have a role in our electoral process and I believe we have foolishly diluted it, and made it far more dependent on large financial contributors in the process.

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@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

by way of JoeNation on FB

http://www.shakesville.com/2016/01/what-is-bernie-sanders-even-doing.html

expresses my feelings about the midterms and downticket candidates so very well

Downticket candidates... Aren't those also known as Super Delegates?

Quote:

- On the board of Wal-Mart for 6 years
- Lived in White House for 8 years
- Donating to down-ticket superdelegates
- Fully supported by the DNC and the money that backs it
- Four of five top contributors are some of largest banks in country
- Made more personal income from a few Goldman Sachs speeches than most make in decades
- Family's net worth >$100M

Hillary, the fact that you ABSOLUTELY exemplify the Democratic establishment is a big win for feminism. However, your statement in this debate... EPIC FAIL!

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From the link above....

Bernie Sanders has a hard-earned reputation for integrity. Refusing to support the Democratic party while accepting their support (and in in fact suing the party over his own campaign's wrongdoing, and then fundraising off the incident) is eventually going to tarnish that reputation. And that's a bad thing, not only for Sanders personally, but for his cause, for his supporters, and for the people who really were hoping for something different from him.

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@McGentrix,

I dunno - are people running for local and state office during midterm elections super delegates? if they are, then sure.

I'd really never thought of sheriffs , dog-catchers and mayors as super delegates but I suppose they could be.

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The main reason I have backed off of these political threads is because we, all of us here, have our minds made up. I see no point in going on and on about it to the committed. I will never vote for Clinton or any Republican and Clinton's people have their view and the Republicans have theirs. I have other things to do.

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@edgarblythe,

Keep in touch

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@edgarblythe,

My mind is not made up at all. There is still the choice between bad and worse.

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Quote:

One of the problems Hillary Clinton has had in this primary so far is deciding what, exactly, her case against Bernie Sanders should be. She's had a difficult time of it because, as I've written, even her own supporters generally like Sanders quite a lot personally.

As a result, she's been throwing a bunch of things against the wall to see what will stick. Sometimes she says Sanders is too left-wing, like on his health-care views. Sometimes she says he's not left-wing enough, like on gun control and immigration. Sometimes she says she essentially agrees with him but that her plans for achieving their shared goals are more realistic. And lately she's been arguing, rather unconvincingly, that the problem with Sanders is that he's insufficiently supportive of Barack Obama

The rest at the source

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@revelette2,

The answer to her problem is simple: sincerity. Just say what you sincerely think is best for the country. Just say sincerely why you think Sanders's ideas are wrong, and why you think so. No need to thow mud at anyone. Just say the truth as you see it.

But as we all know, Clinton has a sincerity deficit.

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@Olivier5,

Actually I thought she sounded sincere at her closing statements. I think all these years of facing attacks have succeeded in building up a wall around her and it shows up as stiff and unapproachable. My opinion, of which I am allowed to have. The candidates have to show why a voter should choose them rather than the other guy or girl, it is not necessarily mud slinging.

Quote:

We agree that we've got to get unaccountable money out of politics. We agree that Wall Street should never be allowed to wreck Main Street again. But here's the point I want to make tonight. I am not a single issue candidate, and I do not believe we live in a single issue country.

I think that a lot of what we have to overcome to break down the barriers that are holding people back, whether it's poison in the water of the children of Flint, or whether it's the poor miners who are being left out and left behind in coal country, or whether it is any other American today who feels somehow put down and oppressed by racism, by sexism, by discrimination against the LGBT community, against the kind of efforts that need to be made to root out all of these barriers, that is what I want to take on.

And here in Wisconsin I want to reiterate, we've got to stand up for unions and working people who have been at the core of the American middle class and who are being attacked by ideologues, by demagogues. Yes, does Wall Street and big financial interests along with drug companies, insurance companies, big oil, all of it, have too much influence? You're right.

But if we were to stop that tomorrow, we would still have the indifference, the negligence that we saw in Flint. We would still have racism holding people back. We would still have sexism preventing women from getting equal pay. We would still have LGBT people who get married on Saturday and get fired on Monday. And we would still have governors like Scott Walker and others trying to rip out the heart of the middle class by making it impossible to organize and stand up for better wages and working conditions.

So I'm going to keep talking about tearing down all the barriers that stand in the way of Americans fulfilling their potential because I don't think our country can live up to its potential unless we give a chance to every single American to live up to theirs.

From the source I left previously.

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@revelette2,

I thought Hillary's closing was very good.

Her "defense" of Obama is aggressive and puts Sanders in an awkward spot, particularly with the importance of the African-American vote in the next few contests... but I grimaced a bit when she made this line of attack.

Being seen as Obama's third term is not going to help Hillary in the general election.

1 Reply

@revelette2,

Quote:

The candidates have to show why a voter should choose them rather than the other guy or girl, it is not necessarily mud slinging

I agree, and in fact that's what I suggest she should be doing, without lying.

It's the lying that I called "mud slinging". Lying about Sanders being tied to the Wall Street orfionancial institutions for instance. That was pretty ridiculous.

Bernie's candidacy can be good for Hillary, IF AND ONLY IF it shows her capacity to argue and convince and allow her to sharpen her ideas, but NOT if she sees it as a cause for lies and dirty tricks.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

I thought Hillary's closing was very good.

Her "defense" of Obama is aggressive and puts Sanders in an awkward spot, particularly with the importance of the African-American vote in the next few contests... but I grimaced a bit when she made this line of attack.

Being seen as Obama's third term is not going to help Hillary in the general election.

I disagree, and we will definitely all get to see who is right in time.
Obama won a second term on the strength of his first, and I think history will validate him as a good if not great president. I think Clinton would be helped in a general by touting the strength of those two terms in search of her first.

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@snood,

snood wrote:

Obama won a second term on the strength of his first, and I think history will validate him as a good if not great president. I think Clinton would be helped in a general by touting the strength of those two terms in search of her first.

There was nothing strong though about Mr. Obama's second term. He wasted all of his political capital throwing tantrums at the NRA, and as a consequence hasn't achieved a thing.

Mr. Obama's second term is going to win Mr. Trump such a sweeping victory that it'll be 20 years before the Democrats are able to field a winning candidate again.

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@snood,

We will see.

Many progressives are disappointed in the Obama administration. We feel he compromised far too much on the ACA, deported more people than George Bush, expanded an immoral drone program and sacrificed civil rights for national security.

Of course, most of us will fall into line for the general election should Clinton win...

But combine this with the feelings from more conservative Americans and this might be a problem.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Many progressives are disappointed in the Obama administration. We feel he compromised far too much on the ACA, deported more people than George Bush, expanded an immoral drone program and sacrificed civil rights for national security.

He was barely able to get the ACA passed. He couldn't have compromised any less and still had the program pass. Besides, the Left needs to get over this "single payer" Kool Aid. It's getting silly now.

There is nothing even remotely immoral about Mr. Obama conducting military strikes against the enemy that carried out 9/11. As commander in chief, protecting us is his job.

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